Listen Br'er Sterling: The Critic as Liar [A Pre(r)amble to Essays on Sterling Brown

Abstract

Can a literary and critical reputation be built on the basis not just of what someone has written but also what s/he has said, on kaleidoscopic traces of the tongue gone pure? Anyone interested in the future of African-American literary and cultural understanding must trust so, as a store of discursive and methodological wisdom remains lodged in the memories, tapes, and inscriptions of Sterling Brown's public presentations, extemporaneous tutorials, and other teacherly rambles. From his telephone booth room at Williams' Berkshire Hall and his Lincoln University digs at The Monastery to the downstairs apartment at Fisk's Spence House and nearby Gillie's Barbershop, and finally at the Kearney St. house of the Howard years and untold lecture halls, libraries, community centers, and street corners in between, Sterling Brown created ritual spaces of vibrant African-American discourse where the boundaries of formal and vernacular expression were crossed and recrossed, the insistent rhythm of talking and listening constituting a vision of black collective consciousness not as system, essence, blueprint, or sentiment, but as dialogue. Sterling Brown's capacity to speak in elegant, extended arcs of dazzling utterance no matter the occasion was legendary, and, everpercipient, he knew his own propensities: Those of you who have to go to lunch may leave now, he once told a rapt Swarthmore College audience, I will still be talking when you return. But one never had the sense with him of being suffocated by lengthy monologue. That is because Sterling's performances were acts of critical ventriloquism, populated by a plethora of voices whose varying tonal markings turned his perorations on art, cultural history, and political economy into a richly variegated commentary on the relation of meaning to style and context. This is true in a way not inconsistent with the purport